Thousands of Underage Girls Are Wed Each Year in the United States

When Sherry Johnson was 11 years old, she was married off to a 20-year-old member of her conservative Pentecostal church who'd raped and impregnated her. Shockingly, the marriage of the 11-year-old was totally legal, because although you're supposed to be 18 to get married in almost all states, there are exceptions, including parental consent, judicial approval, pregnancy, or in a combination of these situations.

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In the New York Times Op Ed section, columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about Johnson's story, as well as the many other children who are forced into marriage in the United States. In Florida alone, children 16 and under are being married at a rate of one every few days. And they're not the only state with this issue. According to Kristof, the states with the highest instances of child marriage are Arkansas, Idaho, and Kentucky.

Kristof writes:

In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”

The great majority of child marriages is between a young girl and an adult men, and getting married is a way to sometimes legally circumvent statutory rape laws.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson's marriage didn't last, and she now campaigns for a state law to curb underage marriages.

“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease,” she said, “so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”

Other people are also undertaking the fight, including a New Hampshire girl scout named Cassandra Levesque who learned that children in her state could marry at the age of 13, and set out to change the law. It's now dubbed "Cassandra's bill" and it aims to raise the legal age of marriage to 18.

Horrifically, some state legislatures strongly resisted the change.

“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” said one Republican state rep, David Bates. And in March the Republican-led House killed the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13.

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Kristoff ends with noting that although the United States has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship,” we have a long way to go if we want to fix things in our own.